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By NASA
6 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Scientists believe giant impacts — like the one depicted in this artist’s concept — occurred on Mars 4.5 billion years ago, injecting debris from the impact deep into the planet’s mantle. NASA’s InSight lander detected this debris before the mission’s end in 2022.NASA/JPL-Caltech Rocky material that impacted Mars lies scattered in giant lumps throughout the planet’s mantle, offering clues about Mars’ interior and its ancient past.
What appear to be fragments from the aftermath of massive impacts on Mars that occurred 4.5 billion years ago have been detected deep below the planet’s surface. The discovery was made thanks to NASA’s now-retired InSight lander, which recorded the findings before the mission’s end in 2022. The ancient impacts released enough energy to melt continent-size swaths of the early crust and mantle into vast magma oceans, simultaneously injecting the impactor fragments and Martian debris deep into the planet’s interior.
There’s no way to tell exactly what struck Mars: The early solar system was filled with a range of different rocky objects that could have done so, including some so large they were effectively protoplanets. The remains of these impacts still exist in the form of lumps that are as large as 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) across and scattered throughout the Martian mantle. They offer a record preserved only on worlds like Mars, whose lack of tectonic plates has kept its interior from being churned up the way Earth’s is through a process known as convection.
A cutaway view of Mars in this artist’s concept (not to scale) reveals debris from ancient impacts scattered through the planet’s mantle. On the surface at left, a meteoroid impact sends seismic signals through the interior; at right is NASA’s InSight lander.NASA/JPL-Caltech The finding was reported Thursday, Aug. 28, in a study published by the journal Science.
“We’ve never seen the inside of a planet in such fine detail and clarity before,” said the paper’s lead author, Constantinos Charalambous of Imperial College London. “What we’re seeing is a mantle studded with ancient fragments. Their survival to this day tells us Mars’ mantle has evolved sluggishly over billions of years. On Earth, features like these may well have been largely erased.”
InSight, which was managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, placed the first seismometer on Mars’ surface in 2018. The extremely sensitive instrument recorded 1,319 marsquakes before the lander’s end of mission in 2022.
NASA’s InSight took this selfie in 2019 using a camera on its robotic arm. The lander also used its arm to deploy the mission’s seismometer, whose data was used in a 2025 study showing impacts left chunks of debris deep in the planet’s interior.NASA/JPL-Caltech Quakes produce seismic waves that change as they pass through different kinds of material, providing scientists a way to study the interior of a planetary body. To date, the InSight team has measured the size, depth, and composition of Mars’ crust, mantle, and core. This latest discovery regarding the mantle’s composition suggests how much is still waiting to be discovered within InSight’s data.
“We knew Mars was a time capsule bearing records of its early formation, but we didn’t anticipate just how clearly we’d be able to see with InSight,” said Tom Pike of Imperial College London, coauthor of the paper.
Quake hunting
Mars lacks the tectonic plates that produce the temblors many people in seismically active areas are familiar with. But there are two other types of quakes on Earth that also occur on Mars: those caused by rocks cracking under heat and pressure, and those caused by meteoroid impacts.
Of the two types, meteoroid impacts on Mars produce high-frequency seismic waves that travel from the crust deep into the planet’s mantle, according to a paper published earlier this year in Geophysical Research Letters. Located beneath the planet’s crust, the Martian mantle can be as much as 960 miles (1,550 kilometers) thick and is made of solid rock that can reach temperatures as high as 2,732 degrees Fahrenheit (1,500 degrees Celsius).
Scrambled signals
The new Science paper identifies eight marsquakes whose seismic waves contained strong, high-frequency energy that reached deep into the mantle, where their seismic waves were distinctly altered.
“When we first saw this in our quake data, we thought the slowdowns were happening in the Martian crust,” Pike said. “But then we noticed that the farther seismic waves travel through the mantle, the more these high-frequency signals were being delayed.”
Using planetwide computer simulations, the team saw that the slowing down and scrambling happened only when the signals passed through small, localized regions within the mantle. They also determined that these regions appear to be lumps of material with a different composition than the surrounding mantle.
With one riddle solved, the team focused on another: how those lumps got there.
Turning back the clock, they concluded that the lumps likely arrived as giant asteroids or other rocky material that struck Mars during the early solar system, generating those oceans of magma as they drove deep into the mantle, bringing with them fragments of crust and mantle.
Charalambous likens the pattern to shattered glass — a few large shards with many smaller fragments. The pattern is consistent with a large release of energy that scattered many fragments of material throughout the mantle. It also fits well with current thinking that in the early solar system, asteroids and other planetary bodies regularly bombarded the young planets.
On Earth, the crust and uppermost mantle is continuously recycled by plate tectonics pushing a plate’s edge into the hot interior, where, through convection, hotter, less-dense material rises and cooler, denser material sinks. Mars, by contrast, lacks tectonic plates, and its interior circulates far more sluggishly. The fact that such fine structures are still visible today, Charalambous said, “tells us Mars hasn’t undergone the vigorous churning that would have smoothed out these lumps.”
And in that way, Mars could point to what may be lurking beneath the surface of other rocky planets that lack plate tectonics, including Venus and Mercury.
More about InSight
JPL managed InSight for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. InSight was part of NASA’s Discovery Program, managed by the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built the InSight spacecraft, including its cruise stage and lander, and supported spacecraft operations for the mission.
A number of European partners, including France’s Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), supported the InSight mission. CNES provided the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) instrument to NASA, with the principal investigator at IPGP (Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris). Significant contributions for SEIS came from IPGP; the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany; the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) in Switzerland; Imperial College London and Oxford University in the United Kingdom; and JPL. DLR provided the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3) instrument, with significant contributions from the Space Research Center (CBK) of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Astronika in Poland. Spain’s Centro de Astrobiología (CAB) supplied the temperature and wind sensors.
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Andrew Good
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Last Updated Aug 28, 2025 Related Terms
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By NASA
3 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
From left to right, Astronaut Tracy Dyson, Jeremy Shidner, Sara R. Wilson, and Christopher Broadaway pose for a photo after the 2025 Silver Snoopy Awards ceremony. NASA/Mark Knopp Three employees from NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia recently earned the Silver Snoopy award, a prestigious honor given to NASA employees and contractors across the agency for exceptional achievements related to spaceflight safety or mission success. Christopher Broadaway, Jeremy Shidner, and Sara Wilson received the awards during a ceremony held at the center on July 22.
The Silver Snoopy award is given personally by NASA astronauts and is presented to less than one percent of the agency’s workforce annually. The award is one of several overseen by the Space Flight Awareness (SFA) Program at NASA. Established in 1963, the SFA Program is vital in ensuring quality and flight safety of America’s space program. The SFA Program works to highlight the individuals behind the success of NASA’s programs as well as motivate the next generation of innovators and cosmic explorers.
Astronaut Tracy Dyson visited Langley to present the Silver Snoopy lapel pin and a framed Silver Snoopy certificate. Dyson flew aboard the space shuttle Endeavor on STS-118, served as flight engineer for Expedition 23/24, and conducted hundreds of hours of scientific investigations aboard the International Space Station for Expedition 70/71. She has spent a total of 373 days in space and dedicated over 23 hours to spacewalks.
As a flight engineer with substantial experience, Dyson understands the importance of space flight safety.
“Those who are receiving this award didn’t do it because they came nine to five and left. It’s not because it was just their job,” she said. “It’s because it’s their life, and our lives are safer and better for it.”
Astronaut Tracy Dyson signs certificates of appreciation prior to the 2025 Silver Snoopy Awards ceremony. NASA/Mark Knopp Silver Snoopy recipient and aerospace engineer Jeremey Shidner echoed Dyson’s perspective.
“This level of trust is particularly profound because astronauts understand better than anyone the countless systems, procedures, and people that must work flawlessly for a mission to succeed,” he said. “When astronauts single someone out for recognition, it reflects their confidence that this person embodies the same commitment to excellence and safety that they themselves must maintain.”
The prestigious award consists of a certificate of appreciation signed by Dyson, an authentication letter, and a miniature sterling silver lapel pin in the shape of the well-loved character Snoopy from the comic strip “Peanuts.” Each pin awarded has flown in space. The pins awarded to Langley’s recipients flew aboard STS-118.
The 2025 Silver Snoopy Award pins NASA/Mark Knopp Here are the three award recipients from Langley and their achievements:
Christopher Broadaway: For exemplary support in assisting the Commercial Crew Program ensure safety and mission success in industry partners’ human spaceflight missions.
Jeremy Shidner: For significant contributions to the Commercial Crew Program to ensure flight safety and mission success for Entry, Descent, and Landing. Collaborating closely with the Crew Flight Test team and Mission Operations Flight Dynamics Officers, he refined the simulation model to incorporate real pilot performance data, which resulted in increased entry accuracy, eliminating an elevated risk to crew safety.
Sara R. Wilson: For engineering excellence in the application of advanced statistical tools and methods characterizing NASA’s human spaceflight missions. She also played a key role in developing standardized tests for advanced lunar spacesuit gloves, creating consistency in evaluating materials for extreme lunar environments.
Sarah Reeps and Layla Smith
NASA Langley Research Center
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Last Updated Aug 07, 2025 Related Terms
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By NASA
5 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
The north polar region of Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io was captured by the JunoCam imager aboard NASA’s Juno during the spacecraft’s 57th close pass of the gas giant on Dec. 30, 2023. A technique called annealing was used to help repair radiation damage to the camera in time to capture this image. Image data: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS Image processing by Gerald Eichstädt An experimental technique rescued a camera aboard the agency’s Juno spacecraft, offering lessons that will benefit other space systems that experience high radiation.
The mission team of NASA’s Jupiter-orbiting Juno spacecraft executed a deep-space move in December 2023 to repair its JunoCam imager to capture photos of the Jovian moon Io. Results from the long-distance save were presented during a technical session on July 16 at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Nuclear & Space Radiation Effects Conference in Nashville.
JunoCam is a color, visible-light camera. The optical unit for the camera is located outside a titanium-walled radiation vault, which protects sensitive electronic components for many of Juno’s engineering and science instruments.
This is a challenging location because Juno’s travels carry it through the most intense planetary radiation fields in the solar system. While mission designers were confident JunoCam could operate through the first eight orbits of Jupiter, no one knew how long the instrument would last after that.
Throughout Juno’s first 34 orbits (its prime mission), JunoCam operated normally, returning images the team routinely incorporated into the mission’s science papers. Then, during its 47th orbit, the imager began showing hints of radiation damage. By orbit 56, nearly all the images were corrupted.
The graininess and horizontal lines seen in this JunoCam image show evidence that the camera aboard NASA’s Juno mission suffered radiation damage. The image, which captures one of the circumpolar cyclones on Jupiter’s north pole, was taken Nov. 22, 2023. NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS Long Distance Microscopic Repair
While the team knew the issue may be tied to radiation, pinpointing what, specifically, was damaged within JunoCam was difficult from hundreds of millions of miles away. Clues pointed to a damaged voltage regulator that is vital to JunoCam’s power supply. With few options for recovery, the team turned to a process called annealing, where a material is heated for a specified period before slowly cooling. Although the process is not well understood, the idea is that the heating can reduce defects in the material.
“We knew annealing can sometimes alter a material like silicon at a microscopic level but didn’t know if this would fix the damage,” said JunoCam imaging engineer Jacob Schaffner of Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, which designed and developed JunoCam and is part of the team that operates it. “We commanded JunoCam’s one heater to raise the camera’s temperature to 77 degrees Fahrenheit — much warmer than typical for JunoCam — and waited with bated breath to see the results.”
Soon after the annealing process finished, JunoCam began cranking out crisp images for the next several orbits. But Juno was flying deeper and deeper into the heart of Jupiter’s radiation fields with each pass. By orbit 55, the imagery had again begun showing problems.
“After orbit 55, our images were full of streaks and noise,” said JunoCam instrument lead Michael Ravine of Malin Space Science Systems. “We tried different schemes for processing the images to improve the quality, but nothing worked. With the close encounter of Io bearing down on us in a few weeks, it was Hail Mary time: The only thing left we hadn’t tried was to crank JunoCam’s heater all the way up and see if more extreme annealing would save us.”
Test images sent back to Earth during the annealing showed little improvement the first week. Then, with the close approach of Io only days away, the images began to improve dramatically. By the time Juno came within 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) of the volcanic moon’s surface on Dec. 30, 2023, the images were almost as good as the day the camera launched, capturing detailed views of Io’s north polar region that revealed mountain blocks covered in sulfur dioxide frosts rising sharply from the plains and previously uncharted volcanos with extensive flow fields of lava.
Testing Limits
To date, the solar-powered spacecraft has orbited Jupiter 74 times. Recently, the image noise returned during Juno’s 74th orbit.
Since first experimenting with JunoCam, the Juno team has applied derivations of this annealing technique on several Juno instruments and engineering subsystems.
“Juno is teaching us how to create and maintain spacecraft tolerant to radiation, providing insights that will benefit satellites in orbit around Earth,” said Scott Bolton, Juno’s principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “I expect the lessons learned from Juno will be applicable to both defense and commercial satellites as well as other NASA missions.”
More About Juno
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Juno is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Italian Space Agency, Agenzia Spaziale Italiana, funded the Jovian InfraRed Auroral Mapper. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built and operates the spacecraft. Various other institutions around the U.S. provided several of the other scientific instruments on Juno.
More information about Juno is at:
https://www.nasa.gov/juno
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Last Updated Jul 21, 2025 Related Terms
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By NASA
Curiosity Navigation Curiosity Home Mission Overview Where is Curiosity? Mission Updates Science Overview Instruments Highlights Exploration Goals News and Features Multimedia Curiosity Raw Images Images Videos Audio Mosaics More Resources Mars Missions Mars Sample Return Mars Perseverance Rover Mars Curiosity Rover MAVEN Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mars Odyssey More Mars Missions Mars Home 4 min read
Curiosity Blog, Sols 4593-4594: Three Layers and a Lot of Structure at Volcán Peña Blanca
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity used its Mast Camera (Mastcam) to acquire this image showing a part of Volcán Peña Blanca from about 10 meters away (about 33 feet). It is already possible to see the different layers and make out that some of them are parallel, while others are at an angle. Curiosity acquired this image on July 6, 2025 — Sol 4591, or Martian day 4,591 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission — at 10:13:13 UTC. NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS Written by Susanne P. Schwenzer, Professor of Planetary Mineralogy at The Open University, UK
Earth planning date: Monday, July 7, 2025
A few planning sols ago, we spotted a small ridge in the landscape ahead of us. Ridges and structures that are prominently raised above the landscape are our main target along this part of Curiosity’s traverse. There are many hypotheses on how they formed, and water is one of the likely culprits involved. That is because water reacts with the original minerals, moves the compounds around and some precipitate as minerals in the pore spaces, which is called “cement” by sedimentologists, and generally known as one mechanism to make a rock harder. It’s not the only one, so the Curiosity science team is after all the details at this time to assess whether water indeed was responsible for the more resistant nature of the ridges. Spotting one that is so clearly raised prominently above the landscape — and in easy reach of the rover, both from the distance but also from the path that leads up to it — was therefore very exciting. In addition, the fact that we get a side view of the structure as well as a top view adds to the team’s ability to read the geologic record of this area. “Outcrops,” as we call those places, are one of the most important tools for any field geologist, including Curiosity and team!
Therefore, the penultimate drive stopped about 10 meters away (about 33 feet) from the structure to get a good assessment of where exactly to direct the rover (see the blog post by my colleague Abby). You can see an example of the images Curiosity took with its Mast Camera above; if you want to see them all, they are on the raw images page (and by the time you go, there may be even more images that we took in today’s plan.
With all the information from the last parking spot, the rover drivers parked Curiosity in perfect operating distance for all instruments. In direct view of the rover was a part of Volcán Peña Blanca that shows several units; this blogger counts at least three — but I am a mineralogist, not a sedimentologist! I am really looking forward to the chemical data we will get in this plan. My sedimentologist colleagues found the different angles of smaller layers in the three bigger layers especially interesting, and will look at the high-resolution images from the MAHLI instrument very closely.
With all that in front of us, Curiosity has a very full plan. APXS will get two measurements, the target “Parinacota” is on the upper part of the outcrop and we can even clean it from the dust with the brush, aka DRT. MAHLI will get close-up images to see finer structures and maybe even individual grains. The second APXS target, called “Wila Willki,” is located in the middle part of the outcrop and will also be documented by MAHLI. The third activity of MAHLI will be a so-called dog’s-eye view of the outcrop. For this, the arm reaches very low down to align MAHLI to directly face the outcrop, to get a view of the structures and even a peek underneath some of the protruding ledges. The team is excitedly anticipating the arrival of those images. Stay tuned; you can also find them in the raw images section as soon as we have them!
ChemCam is joining in with two LIBS targets — the target “Pichu Pichu” is on the upper part of the outcrop, and the target “Tacume” is on the middle part. After this much of close up looks, ChemCam is pointing the RMI to the mid-field to look at another of the raised features in more detail and into the far distance to see the upper contact of the boxwork unit with the next unit above it. Mastcam will first join the close up looks and take a large mosaic to document all the details of Volcán Peña Blanca, and to document the LIBS targets, before looking into the distance at two places where we see small troughs around exposed bedrock.
Of course, there are also atmospheric observations in the plan; it’s aphelion cloud season and dust is always of interest. The latter is regularly monitored by atmosphere opacity experiments, and we keep searching for dust devils to understand where, how and why they form and how they move. Curiosity will be busy, and we are very much looking forward to understanding this interesting feature, which is one piece of the puzzle to understand this area we call the boxwork area.
For more Curiosity blog posts, visit MSL Mission Updates
Learn more about Curiosity’s science instruments
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Last Updated Jul 10, 2025 Related Terms
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By NASA
NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS The United States flag adorns an aluminum plate mounted at the base of the mast, or “head,” of NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover. This image of the plate was taken on June 28, 2025 (the 1,548th day, or sol, of the mission), by the WATSON (Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering) camera on the end of the rover’s robotic arm.
WATSON, part of an instrument called SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals), was built by Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS) in San Diego and is operated jointly by MSSS and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. JPL, which is managed for the agency by Caltech, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.
Learn more about Perseverance’s latest science.
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